Everyone at the AI Labs Is a ‘Member of Technical Staff’ Now
A curious thing happens when you scan the staff pages of the leading AI companies: almost nobody has a job title. The New York Times’ Lora Kelley flagged the pattern over the weekend — at the frontier labs, engineers, researchers and executives alike carry the same vague label: “member of technical staff.”
What Is Actually Happening
The label is not new. OpenAI and Anthropic have used “member of technical staff” (MTS) as their standard engineering title for years, deliberately refusing to split “researchers” from “engineers.” Former OpenAI researcher Bob McGrew has said the choice was intentional: at older labs like Google Brain, the divide between PhD researchers and software engineers who handled implementation was, in his words, harmful. The people doing the best AI work write code and touch data — the title reflects that.
What is new is how far the practice is spreading, and what people give up to join it. The NYT’s piece lands on the same day a widely shared roundup catalogued the CTOs who have walked away from C-suite titles to become “members of technical staff” — including Workday’s Peter Bailis, who left an $8 billion revenue company’s top technical role to do reinforcement learning engineering at Anthropic, and You.com co-founder Bryan McCann, who made the same trade in March 2026. Mike Krieger, Instagram’s co-founder and former CTO, stepped back from his Chief Product Officer role at Anthropic to co-lead its internal incubator.
Elon Musk has taken the opposite route to the same destination: xAI titles everyone “engineer,” with Musk calling “researcher” a “relic term from academia” and a “pretentious, low-accountability” label.
The Competitive Reading
There is a sharper reading of the flat title, and the NYT leans into it: opacity as strategy. A former CTO wearing “member of technical staff” on a LinkedIn profile tells competitors nothing about what they lead, what they own, or how senior they are. Whether that is a deliberate feature of the labs’ talent strategy or a side effect of a genuinely flat culture is a matter of interpretation — the labs themselves frame it as philosophy, and it is worth holding both possibilities.
The other interpretation is more generous: at labs where a single research insight can reshape the roadmap, rigid hierarchies slow things down. Title flattening is what happens when the work changes faster than org charts can.
What It Means for Everyone Else’s Career
For workers outside the labs, three practical signals:
Titles are compressing at the top of the market first. The most valuable engineers in the world are voluntarily shedding “senior,” “principal” and even “chief” from their titles. If the most competitive employers can recruit without status labels, expect the practice to trickle outward — job boards are already full of MTS listings at startups imitating the labs.
The ladder is getting less legible. A career ladder is a legibility device: it tells you where you are, what is next, and what a raise means. Flat titles remove that signal from the outside — and, for the people inside them, arguably soften the rungs. The trade-off is real on both sides: more flexibility, less legible status.
Signal is shifting to output. In a title-flat market, what you have shipped and what you can demonstrate matter more than what your business card says — consistent with broader 2026 hiring data showing employers screening for demonstrated AI-fluent capability rather than credentials.
The Balanced Read
Nobody should generalise a handful of elite labs to the whole labour market — most careers will keep their ladders, and most industries still need the legibility that titles provide. But it is a genuine cultural signal when the companies with the strongest bargaining position in the talent market decide titles are optional. Watch whether the label keeps spreading through the startup ecosystem, and whether it stays a philosophical choice or becomes a competitive one.
FAQ
What is a “member of technical staff”? It is the standard engineering title at AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, used across research, infrastructure, safety and product engineering regardless of seniority.
Why are AI labs flattening job titles? The labs say it removes a harmful divide between researchers and engineers; outside observers also note it obscures seniority and specialisation from competitors.
Is the MTS title spreading beyond AI labs? Job boards already list MTS roles at startups and even large tech companies, suggesting the label is imitating the labs’ prestige.
Should job seekers care about titles? Titles still carry legal and salary meaning in most industries, but in AI-adjacent hiring, demonstrated output increasingly outweighs label.
— CJ Murden, editor of Singularity.Kiwi. Former digital technologies teacher, author of AI-focused books. Writing with a New Zealand focus.
